As you may know, this website (Flashcomguru.com) is quite a personal affair. It's not a company website nor is it a place where I reach out for work and I intend to keep it that way.
Nevertheless a lot of the work I take on (yes, I do take on some which some of you won't believe ;) is a result of this blog, the content that's on here and subsequently the traffic I get from many direct links as well as the almighty Google (I just realised that I come up third for the term 'flash video' right after the Wiki entry and Adobe..!). Do you gather that I don't check my web stats very often?
Anyway, back on topic. I get a lot of work through my blog yet I do not trade as Flashcomguru, in fact I kind of hate that label since it suggests that I am some sort of guru and so full of myself that I would call myself one - which isn't the case. The name was meant to be for the site, not me, and came as a result of Flashcomstudio.com (hands up if you remember) and in hindsight I wish I had chosen a different name. But that's water under a bridge now. Ok, I am off topic again...

And I do not mean information on maps... No. Britain From Above is probably the best program on UK television at the moment - in my opinion anyway. When I first watched it I didn't quite know what to expect, I guess I thought it would be someone shooting video out of a plane for an hour. How wrong I was.

Each episode of this series focuses on a particular topic such as the UK transport network, abandoned industries or the transformation of London over the years. One really innovative piece which I found especially interesting was the visual mapping of information over a map of Britain or London. This involved visualising data such as landline telephone calls in all major UK cities, GPS data traces from taxis across London or the air traffic movements over the UK.

The header says it all. You can download the Flex Builder Updater here.

This must be my shortest blog post ever...

The BBC will be adding several channels to its online simulcast lineup shortly, including BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies. This is in addition to the already announced simulcast (read: live streaming) of BBC One.

Viewing habits and TV consumption is rapidly changing and this announcement just underlines the obvious trend. I'm sure future generations will find it very strange indeed that programs used to start at set times. Of course the really cool thing about this announcement is the fact that Flash will once again play a key role, since the streams are likely to be streamed via the iPlayer or one of its live-streaming-baby-brothers. Personally, I'm determined to ride this wave... watch this space.

The full press release is here.

And the usual disclaimer for everyone not in the UK: sorry but you'll be GEOIP blocked when trying to access any of the BBC streams. Those fortunate enough to be in the UK must hold a valid TV license (yes, no kidding, even if you have no TV but watch on a laptop or mobile phone).

If you are using the FLVPlayback component in combination with a custom UI seekbar component then you may have asked yourself why the seekbar is not clickable. Many video players implement this functionality: rather than having to find the handle, drag it and let go it is possible to click the seekbar anywhere to jump to that point.

Fortunately it is ot too difficult to add this piece of behaviour. The following code is applicable to an instance of the FLVPlayback component on stage (instance name 'player') not using a skin but using a custom UI seekbar component (instance name 'seekbar').

Give that a try and you should be able to click the seekbar to jump to any point in the video (provided you are streaming or - if using progressive download - the video has already loaded up to the part you are trying to seek to).

Finally a conference on my doorstep! Tomorrow afternoon I will be hosting a session on 'Collaboration with Flash Media Server' at the European eLearning Summit in Nottingham. I am hoping to show lots of examples and allow the audience to join in - may the WIFI be with us.

Later this year (but not much later actually...) I will present a similar session at Flash on the Beach, the main difference being that the session in Brighton will have a bit more of a focus on code as well as a some inspirational pieces.
If you attend either one of the conference then please find me and say hi.

In case you are trying to find the debugger version of Flash Player 10 (like I was): you can get it here.

The BBC have started to roll out an updated version of the iPlayer which offers a new 'high quality' option, delivering video encoded in H.264 at 800kbps. And wow, does it look sweet (unfortunately I cannot embed the image here as it's too large). And that's before you blow it up to fullscreen - I played it on my 24" iMac and the quality was truly impressive. What's more important though is the fact that this player is so easy to access, and videos play without rebuffering. Click and watch, it cannot get any easier.

This news is pretty major, considering that Flash Player 9 is required to play the H.264 encoded content. "Back in December of last year, relatively few people had installed the Flash player needed to play H.264 content; now almost 80% of BBC iPlayer users have it", says Anthony Rose on the BBC Internet Blog. Clearly this sets a benchmark and should convince any doubters that Flash Player 9's features are now totally ready for mainstream - including its hardware acceleration features.

I wish the whole world could access the iPlayer pages because it is an online experience that's largely unrivaled. I've heard that the BBC is thinking about releasing some worldwide content - you should look forward to it.

There's lost more info about the H.264 rollout on the BBC Blog.

This is not brand new news it may not have reached the mainstream. Adobe has big plans for its video production workflow and voice-to-text extraction could be a new milestone in their quest for world domination (ok, maybe I am exaggerating a bit).

Beet.TV have more info on this, and their comments are spot on: the implications of having extensive metadata about Flsh video content are massive, and it will catapult video search functionality into a new era.

I've just managed to iron out a nasty bug in one of my FMS apps and this issue will likely affect other applications.
One of my clients noticed that some users would show up multiple times in a userlist of one of my applications. The userlist was tied to a SharedObject and users were removed from this SharedObject as they logged off. I noticed that the issue only surfaces in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, regardless of the minor Flash Player version used.
Moreover (and this was the hard bit to figure out) the issue seemed to surface only on those pages which used SWFObject 2 or SWFObject 2.1 to embed the SWF. Any pages using a previous version of SWFObject (in particular I was using version 1.5) the problem did not occur.

My conclusion is therefore that the problem somehow lies with SWFObject and how it interacts with Internet Explorer. For some reason the onDisconnect event is not invoked on FMS (I was using FMS 2 in this particular app) when my SWF was embedded with SWFObject 2.0 or above and I have now rolled back to SWFObject 1.5. Hope this helps someone as it may easily have you pulling your hair out.